


The Deafening Silence

by pinkpoedi



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, Dark Feelings, F/M, Hurt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-26 07:32:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12054267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkpoedi/pseuds/pinkpoedi
Summary: Dark story about Janeway's feelings-----------World's biggest THANK YOU to Bedelia27 not just for beta reading!





	The Deafening Silence

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bedelia27](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bedelia27/gifts).



> Set in season 7 but not following events  
> relationships just implied, mainly Janeway focused.

“Coffee, black…. No… computer delay that order. Whiskey, Jameson, triple distilled.” The replicator made the familiar sound and a glass appeared, filling itself with a golden liquid a second later. Kathryn took the glass out of the replicator and swirled the liquid in the glass. She closed her eyes and set it to her lip. Without opening her mouth, she let it touch the sensitive flesh, enjoying the tickling and slightly burning feeling. She opened her lips and took a sip. It coated first her tongue and then her whole mouth. She let it linger for a while and then swallowed, feeling it make its way towards her stomach, leaving a warm feeling behind. A sound that was a mixture between a groan and a sigh escaped her mouth.  
She felt it coming. Almost heard them. The dark feelings screaming inside her, threatening to smash her from within. They had been a constant companion for the better part of her life. Since her teenage years, she had had ‘phases’ how her mother loved to call them. Hours, rarely days, when she had locked herself in her room. She couldn’t stand to have company during those phases. It felt like she herself was already too much and no matter how big the room, she always felt slightly claustrophobic.  
During her first year at the academy they became louder again. She had been like most students, enjoying her new freedom. She enjoyed partying until sunrise, flirting, dancing and drinking. It wasn’t until one night that they became overwhelming. She was sitting at her desk at 3 a.m. surrounded by empty coffee mugs and padds studying for the test in quantum mechanics II. She knew she was one of the best students but she should have started studying earlier. There was just so much going on. Now she had reached a point where she knew the time left would not be enough to make her pass the exam with the expected excellency.  
That thought made her protecting walls come shuttering down. Suddenly she started sobbing and didn’t know how to stop. What if she wasn’t among the best in the exam? What if she even failed? Another rush of tears came streaming down her face. In that moment, she realized she had no one to ask for help. No one she could call and talk to. Of course, she had friends and parents that loved her but they wouldn’t be able to understand her. She was daddy’s golden bird, he was always so proud of her and kept telling everyone what an exemplary girl his daughter was. Her mother had told her ever since she was a little kid that she would achieve anything she ever wanted. Her sister Phoebe once had told her at a house party of a common friend after way too many beers for her age what a nightmare it was to have her as a sister and how she hated standing in her shadow. That sentence had left a scar in her heart but as much as it had hurt that night it had improved the relationship between the two of them. They had never talked about it afterwards and she wasn’t sure if Phoebe even remembered having said that out loud. But Kathryn would never in her life forget that.  
For a moment, she thought about calling a friend. But she couldn’t think of anyone. Her friends from the academy were all either asleep or studying themselves and for most of them she was sure their friendship was mostly based on friendly competition. So, she was sitting there crying into her half empty coffee mug in her hand, feeling the tears streaming down her cheeks and leaving a salty road. She was alone. Surrounded by hundreds of people but still alone. That knowledge felt like physically constricting her thorax and made it hard for her to breath.  
She made a decision that night that had drastically shaped her life ever since. If she wouldn’t be able to do it alone she would never be able to do it at all. She couldn’t pinpoint what “it” really was that moment though. Definitely not just that stupid exam in Quantum mechanics II. But she had a vague feeling she would learn one day…  
The work would always be the one thing to lift her up. After writing that intuition down on a piece of paper she had glued it on the wall of her desk. From that night on whenever she had felt her own dark feelings rising to fast and high, threatening to constrict her breathing again, she had looked at these written words and somehow found the force to keep the overwhelming power at bay.  
After finishing the academy, she had kept that piece of paper as a kind of talisman. 

It wasn’t until the accident that left her without her father and fiancé though, that she had to discover how claustrophobic her own mind could make her really feel. After that incident, she hadn’t been able to leave her bed for days. From the outside, she must have seemed too silent, too still, just too little. Too little of everything. She didn’t eat, she didn’t sleep, she didn’t talk. Everything that had happened around her felt like being covered in fog. She always assumed it was because her mind was so busy processing what was happening inside her. All the thoughts and feelings that felt like crashing her from within. After seeing her like this for five days her mother and sister had decided that this exceeded a ‘normal’ mourning phase. It wasn’t long after a doctor she hadn’t known before had made a house call that she was sent to a special clinic where she was treated for her depression.  
Her Starfleet record didn’t show any traces of therapy or even consolations by psychotherapists. She never asked but she was pretty sure that either her mother had asked Owen Paris for it or it was his own doing to leave that part out of any medical records. 

But those thoughts and feelings always had been her companion. She had learned to live with them though and even mastered to use them as a kind of compass. Whenever the dark voices and thoughts got too loud and to the verge of overwhelming, she knew she had to work extra hard.  
Taking a second sip of her whisky Kathryn looked at the half empty glass and put it on the coffee table before sitting down on her couch. She knew what the pile of padds next to her said without looking at them. After the last battle with a Borg vessel six days ago Voyager was heavily damaged. They were still hiding in a nebula, trying to repair the damage of the last encounter. Running low on resources, the crew morale was decreasing. Systems in engineering had started to fail again the day before and B’Elana and her team were working around the clock to fix what was possible with their limited options. Neelix did everything in his power to create new dishes with the same ingredients and lift the crew’s spirit but if the fight this morning in the mess hall was any indication it didn’t work too well. As soon as the shields were working in a stable matter again they had to leave this nebula but with every solved problem three new seemed to pop up. Nothing worked and they were running out of options. Kathryn had spent the whole day in her quarters looking for answers but about two hours ago the dark feelings became too strong. She had put down the padds, shut off her computer console and curled herself into a ball on her sofa sobbing in the dark.  
Now she was sitting there, her eyes still swollen from the crying, the hurt from the sobbing slowly being silenced by the slight burn of the whiskey. Suddenly everything became silent and the silence became so loud it was deafening. And there it was. One thought that came rising fast and loud. She closed her eyes feeling like even the dark quarters were too bright for her eyes. She felt like being hit by a shuttle when suddenly all she could think was one thing: It wasn’t enough. The work wasn’t enough. It wasn’t strong enough to lift her up anymore. She couldn’t do it anymore, not alone. She needed help. She needed help badly…and not just fixing the problem at hand… but even more fixing herself. The walls she had put up around her they were coming loose, she heard them cracking and breaking.  
There was only one person she trusted enough to help her. Her throat made a rattling sound and she felt like breathing for the first time after almost drowning when she saw his face behind her closed eyelids. Opening her eyes, Kathryn stood up from the couch. She wiped away her tears and walked toward her doors. She couldn’t wait any longer. She needed to see him now. She would just go in there and dive into his arms and never let him go again. He had promised her to wait for her forever, just now she realized he had known. He had known all along that one day she would realize that she needed him.  
Just when her door swished open and her eyes still adapted to the sudden brightness she heard his voice. He had come to her! Her heart overflowed with joy. But a nanosecond after it burst into thousand pieces like it was hit by a photon torpedo. Kathryn gasped for air and her hand flew to her mouth to silence the escaping sounds before her mind even processed what her eyes saw. There he was. He was walking away from her. Literally. She had just seen the glimpse of him, his hand on the slender small of her back when he had whispered something into her ear and then kissed her cheek, his face becoming masked by her blonde hair.  
Kathryn stumbled back into her dark quarters and like the door of her quarters she could feel her heart shutting close.


End file.
